Political Quotes

“Today, I offer an amendment to address the serious flaws within the underlying bill. Under the guise of tracking money laundering, this bill imposes a crushing paperwork burden squarely targeted at small business owners. It creates a massive new Federal Government database containing the addresses of innocent American citizens and will do nothing to track down criminals. Under the Obama administration, FinCEN issued regulations that banks collect the beneficial ownership information of these businesses. The regulations have proven so confusing, burdensome, and unnecessary that banks have sought relief from these regulations. This bill effectively shifts the reporting burden onto mom-and-pop businesses that have never even heard of FinCEN. The bill adopts a different definition of beneficial ownership that is even more confusing and vague than the one used by Treasury's rules, which has already puzzled regulators and banks for years. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the bill would generate 25 to 30 million new filings every year. Failure to comply could result in jail time up to 3 years, thousands of dollars in fines, compromise of private information, and more. The bill also raises serious privacy concerns by creating yet another database that is effectively the first-of-its-kind Federal registry of small businesses and small business ownership. It contains no subpoena or warrant-type restrictions for Federal law enforcement to access.…”